Defense and technology company Raytheon has built this smart claw called Big Arm that can deftly handle heavy loads and mimic a human operator's arm motions. Now it just needs a home.

You remember the claw crane. It's that popular arcade game in which you try to grab a stuffed toy or other prize with a mechanical arm controlled via joystick. The game makes money because it's so much harder than it looks; the second you think you've snared the stuffed bear for your sweetheart, it slips through your robotic remote fingertips.

Raytheon's newest creation makes mechanical handling easy and intuitive, and it could pick up a lot more than a stuffed animal. It's called Big Arm, and this machine, which is tracked to the exact movements of your biological arm, could handle a 200-pound slab of steel as easily as your natural-born limb grasps a coffee cup.

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Big Arm is made of two 7-foot arms mounted on a tracked platform. Think of it as the real-life counterpart to the power loader that Sigourney Weaver drove in Aliens. Raytheon built the device to fill the gap between loads that humans can easily handle—about 40 pounds—and loads that heavy machinery can easily handle, which is more on the scale of 400 pounds. Possible applications include industrial handling, loading and unloading cargo, working in mines, and removing debris from collapsed buildings.

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Big Arm draws its technology from Raytheon's famous Iron Man-style Exoskeleton. It includes sensors, actuators, and hydraulics, but in a more immediately practical form. Unlike the Exoskeleton, which requires an external power source, the arm is completely mobile and self-contained, drawing power for the hydraulics from a diesel engine. It will typically run for 8 hours on one tank of fuel, Raytheon says.

The arm matches the flexibility of the human shoulder, elbow and wrist joints so it can follow the operator's movements exactly. It is equipped with force-reflection feedback, so the operator feels the resistance of what the arm is holding. This gives the same sort of touch as direct human handling—something conventional cranes cannot match.

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Big Arm recently spent a week at the Newport shipyards in Rhode Island, where Raytheon wanted to test how it handled heavy pieces of metal (better than humans or heavy machinery, the company says). For the shipyard task, the slave arm was equipped with magnetic clamps, though another option would be a simple open-and-close mechanical grab for handling industrial piping and similar loads. Fraser Smith, president and lead engineer at Raytheon Sarcos, says that Big Arm can be fitted with more complex devices as needed. These could include dextrous grippers with opposable thumbs for moving rubble in a rescue operation or handling complex and fragile objects.

The current Big Arm platform weighs 4400 pounds and is 43 inches wide and 93 inches long. The arm weighs about 800 pounds, but Smith says it could be scaled up for longer reach or greater lifting capacity. Single or double arms could be mounted on other wheeled or tracked platforms or on other vehicles. "For instance, it could be made a part of a forklift to facilitate palletizing and depalletizing," Smith says, "Or it could be attached to the side of a truck and used to load and empty the cargo bed."

The shipyard tests highlighted some of Big Arm's other advantages. One was safety—having a machine handle the heavy loads cuts the accident and injury risks. The arms are good at stacking objects into compact spaces, making the best use of room in a crowded shipyard where space costs money.

And though Big Arm can match a human's arm movements, it might not need to–at least not all the time. Raytheon says the machine runs in human-controlled mode, completely automatic mode, or at various levels of operator control in between. This means repetitive tasks like loading and unloading could be automated to some extent. And Big Arm, being a machine, never forgets what it put where, which makes stock control easier.

Just how much this cool tool will cost, however, is still unknown. Smith says it depends how many Raytheon can make and who wants to buy them. "I can say that there is nothing in the Big Arm that is any more complicated than the subsystems and components that are manufactured to produce cars," he says. "But there are a lot more cars made at this point than Big Arms." If Big Arms were mass-produced, they'd be cheap, but even if they were manufactured only in the hundreds, Smith says, the mounted, mobile two-armed unit could sell for $300,000 to $400,000.

Raytheon's problem might end up being that the technology is a little too out-there. So far no company has figured out a profitable way to introduce Big Arm into its business, so the robot arm remains a prototype on offer for anyone with a potential application. Big Arm provides plenty of reach and muscle, but for now it's an amazing machine looking for a job.